Pep Guardiola, the manager of Manchester City football club, has voiced his thoughts on the ongoing anti-racism protests inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, which gained momentum following the tragic police killing of George Floyd in the United States last month.
Following Manchester City’s first game since the global hiatus caused by the Coronavirus pandemic, Guardiola expressed his deep feeling of “ashame for what white people have done to black people”.
During the recent midweek action in the Premier League, Sheffield United and Aston Villa made a powerful statement against racism: all players wore jerseys displaying “Black Lives Matter” across the back instead of their own names.
Prior to the Manchester City-Arsenal fixture, players from both teams showed unity with the Black Lives Matter movement by taking a knee on the pitch. They also wore kits with the BLM logo printed over the Premier League badge.
Guardiola emphasized the urgent need for global change in the fight against racism, stating, “White people should say sorry for the way we have treated black people for 400 years. We should send a thousand million messages for the black people. I’m embarrassed and ashamed of what the white people have done for the black people. How people can think they are different? All the gestures are good and positive. Everything we can do to make it conscious, it is not acceptable. We have to do a lot of things for the black people which we have not done so far.”
Raheem Sterling, a striker for Manchester City, who recently launched his own anti-racism social media campaign, shared his perspective on the positive direction English football is moving towards in combating racism. Sterling expressed, “I see it as a massive step for the Premier League to allow something like that to happen and it shows we’re going in the right direction. Little by little we’re seeing change. It was natural, it was organic. We saw the teams do it in the earlier kick-off and thought it was something we had to do as well.”
